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Two 'Sputniks of 2019': What Will America Do?

December 31, 2018

President Donald J. Trump, joined by First Lady Melania Trump, arrives on stage to addresses his remarks to U.S. troops Wednesday, December 26, 2018, at the Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

The new year begins with the United States facing scientific and technological surprises from two great nations at once. Russia has tested and begun to deploy hypersonic weapons, against which, numerous U.S. defense and military officials acknowledge, the United States has no defense. And China may be days away from landing its Chang'e-4 mission on the far side of the Moon, a feat no spacefaring nation has attempted before.

How should the United States, and President Donald Trump, react?

In one way, the situation recalls 1977, when EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche was able to confirm the warning of the U.S. Air Force Intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. George J. Keegan, Jr., that Russian scientists were working on relativistic-beam weapons for effective defense against nuclear ICBMs. LaRouche commissioned the dossier, "Sputnik of the Seventies: The Science behind the Soviets' Beam Weapon," and conducted a campaign which led to President Ronald Reagan's "surprise" March 23, 1983 offer to the Soviet leadership — the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). When that leadership arrogantly refused collaboration, LaRouche in late 1983 forecast the end of the Soviet Union in five years. The rest is history — despite the liberal Francis Fukuyama's foolish attempt to make it "the end of history."

But 2019's situation is far better: Both President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China have strong respect for President Trump, despite everything frantic British geopolitical circles have hurled in the way of collaboration among these presidents. President Putin has just sent President Trump a New Year's message which "stressed that Russia-U.S. relations are the most important factor behind ensuring strategic stability and international security, and reaffirmed that Russia is open to dialogue with the United States on the most extensive agenda," definitely including matters of nuclear arms. Presidents Trump and Xi have just had a long discussion of economic matters hailed by both of them as making productive progress. Xi pledged to "strive for an agreement that is mutually beneficial and beneficial to the world as soon as possible." China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang declared in a statement marking 2019 as the 40th anniversary of relations, that "After forty years of development, China-U.S. relations are standing at a new historical starting point."

Let the Trump Administration decide, then: America will collaborate with Russia and China not only "against an arms race," but for the further development {and wider proliferation} of the nuclear propulsion and aerospace technologies involved in hypersonic weapons. It will collaborate with those countries and India and others as well, for humanity's return and development of the Moon as the base of Solar System exploration, and the source of new industrial technologies, laser and plasma technologies, telescopy, and more.

The potentials of the same collaboration include ending two decades of "perpetual regime-change wars" in Southwest Asia — a British geopolicy. Having aroused more furious opposition simply by deciding to bring American troops home from Syria, President Trump would certainly send many British co-thinkers into orbit just by deciding to collaborate on advancing nuclear technologies and space exploration with the major spacefaring nations.

More important than that collaboration itself, it would make possible a real peace, one which involved extending mutual benefits of technological progress to many countries including developing nations. And it would add real physical-economic value to many economies, when London's and Wall Street's speculative bubbles are again nearing a crash.

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